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What's your lifting/exercise routine history? And now?
So, tilder person. What is your lifting/exercise routine right now, what works and don't for you, what you did in the past, what method, what supplements, anything.
Let's trade ideas, rants and nude pictures of our sculpted bodies.
I just woke up from a nightmare. I will go back to sleep and post my part later.
I started late, i think i was 28. Just going to the gym and doing whatever routine the guy there told me to do. I've been lifting for 4 years now.
I started educating myself via reddit and other sources and it started to get better, but it reached a point that i was more making spreadsheets and calculating numbers more than i was lifting.
Now it's been some time since i tossed everything out of the window and i do as i please. I've burned out with so much info and discussion, it took the fun out of it.
I go to the gym 4 times/week. 3 of those days are with my SO. We lift two days and go to a cardio/hiit type of class one day. The other day i lift alone.
Monday i do a full body workout consisting of
Tuesday is the hiit/cardio class with abs in the end. 1 hour of this.
Thursday is upper body day
Friday is lower body day. The staples.
Saturdays: not always, i will do sets of ab-wheel and 50-100 reps sphynx pushups at home to work my triceps.
The 50-100 reps thing saves me a lot of time and i get a nice pump.
I might go back to stabilished routines and spreadsheets some day, but this keeps me going for now.
Also i bike to work almost every day of the week (it takes 8-10 minutes).
I feel i could do more. I wish i could run 5k, but last time i started doing the c25k program, in week 6 i think, i got runners knee and it took a lot of time to heal. Now i'm a little afraid and i think the biking to work and the cardio/hiit class is enough for now.
I already injured myself deadlifting (healed now, but it took a lot of time) and i don't want to compound injuries.
Diet: i just eat food and a lot of protein. My main problem is beer. I think i have strong abs and there's a six pack here somewhere, but it's covered. I'm dying to see it though...
Now, post marriage, kids, and career -- nothing. (post getting married and having kids and a career, I still have all three. Just realized how that could be read as I'm jobless, my kids are dead, and I'm divorced...)
Used to lift three times a week, following the StrongLifts 5x5 protocol. I also ran a few miles and biked approx. 200mi a week.
Not quite the same but.. had a gym in my apartment complex so I went there 7 times a week either before or after work, just when I felt like it.
I ran a 5k basically every day on the treadmill (I didn't do much walking outside) and lifted three times a week. I think I ate kind of healthy with a lots of proteins but no supplements or anything.
Now I moved to another place: No gym, bad weather and I'm just doing nothing. Stressful work apparently helps me losing all my weight still, but also muscles. I also have no energy right now to even start a workout, tried biking a few days ago but had to stop after 2 minutes.
Come on, guys. We can't let tildes die of a heart attack.
I play 5 vs. 5 soccer once a week. I occasionally go running with colleagues. I bike to work. And for the days I stay home, I have a set of small dumbells (12kg each right now) that I use for "deadlifts", squats, curls and bench presses. And finally, I like doing the 7 minutes workout from time to time.
None of this will make an athlete out of me, but I feel quite fit and it doesn't eat too much of my time.
I used to play soccer for some time too. I'm really bad at sports like this and what started as a fun thing between friends ended up with some guys who take things too seriously. It really sucked the fun out of it for me.
Fortunately, my friends aren't like this. It's all for fun, as it should be.
My exercise started in my early 20s with running. In about 2014 I began to lift. At the risk of TMI, I actually recently wrote a blog post which talks about exactly this (as well as other health-related things I do) and includes a before-and-after-lifting photo and an overview of my current routine.
The gist is I currently lift 3 times a week and focus on powerlifting. I hope to enter a mock meet this year to start doing a little competing for fun. I like powerlifting because it is a nice combination of lifting heavy stuff and nerding out over technique and programming.
Really nice website you got there. I love that bunch of info and i am quite a fit nerd myself, got spreadsheets for everything. It just burned me out a little.
What i'm finding fun is picking exercises and making them my big lifts. It's what i'm doing with weighted pull ups right now.
Good luck on your meet! I'm sure it will be a blast.
PS: i see you do dev work using Go. What do you think of it? I'm starting as a hobby after only knowing bash shell script for some time. Bought an udemy course and plan on starting soon.
Thanks; I can definitely see how maintaining a bunch of data can get a bit tedious, and to be honest I'm not super granular with tracking. The main thing I really track daily as a 'rule' is HRV and lifts (on workout days), a lot of the rest is just going by feel.
That does sound like fun (your idea of picking exercises and making them your big lifts). Sometimes I lose motivation a little and then I just stop any worry about what I'm doing at the gym and focus on just dragging myself there, even for half an hour, just to do something I might find semi-enjoyable. I figure the habit of going is more important than the program itself. Picking fun exercises to focus on sounds like a great way to keep it up.
I do have some non-powerlifting "fun goals" as well, mostly with calisthenic exercises. For example, I want to be able to do a full dragon flag on the bench, so after every workout I cool down with some dragon flags.
Glad you liked the blog, thanks for checking it out!
Edit: As for Go - I really really enjoy it for my hobby project. I wouldn't say I have a favorite language, but Go is just fun and I love how much emphasis it puts on testing (which I'm a big fan of). The toolchain around it to me feels very mature. The language is simple and treats tests as a first class citizen. The community seems great and the few issues I've reported have been addressed quickly by Go devs. At work I don't use Go at all and mostly work with Python, C#, and Rust, but in my spare time Go is a nice alternative.
How are you going about improving on dragon flags? I can do quite a lot of kneeling ab-whell rollouts, but dragon flags are a pain. Half way down i just drop like a turd.
I was reading your blog posts and saw the one about fish tanks being relaxing. They're not. I had one and it was pretty, lots of plants and life. But i had to worry about light, about every fish, i spent money on medicine, heaters, tools for gardening. It was a fun experience, but when i donated everything to a friend who loves fish and i knew would take good care of everything, i felt way more relaxed hahaha
It's a fun hobby though, but taking care of a dog or cat is way easier than a fish tank.
Yeah, I agree with the fish thing as I learned the hard way. I've decided that I won't keep fish again - not just from the stress but because after having these for a couple of years I realized at least to me having fish in a box, no matter how great I try to make the environment, is ethically questionable.
With dragon flags I can go down pretty well, my issue is getting up, so I start off by assisting myself up and then going down from there. I go as low as I can while still being able to get back up for five reps, a little lower on each rep. I still can't go all the way down and back up though. Aside from this five-rep-lowering-and-raising I also practice going all the way down and up with one leg tucked, which reduces the weight significantly (I can actually manage this one).